A dynamic reconfiguration service for CORBA

Providing software qualities such as availability, adaptability and maintainability to long-running distributed applications forms a major challenge for the configuration management of a software system. Modifications of a system's structure are expected to happen on-the-fly, to cause minimum execution disruption and to be effected in a way that preserves a consistent state of the participating entities. This paper presents a novel algorithm for performing consistent dynamic reconfiguration of CORBA applications, where consistency refers to RPC integrity. The novelty of the algorithm is that it passivates the links affected by the reconfiguration, which causes the node activities that use them to block but does not result in blocking the entire node. The consequent execution disruption is minimal, a fact that is practically verified by a performance evaluation done in a number of different reconfiguration scenarios.